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Sands Of Darkness: The Good, The Bad, And Ugly Of 'Spec Ops: The Line' (PC)

“Ah jeez…where’s all this violence comin’ from, man? Is it the video games? I bet it’s the video games.” ~ The Radioman, from Spec Ops: The Line

Mild spoilers for the game to follow, though nothing overtly pertinent to the plot. Still, if you haven’t played yet and want to go in blind, here’s the short version: this is an important game and you should go buy it.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was published in 1902. It dealt with the brutality and confusion of colonial-era Africa.

In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola adapted the book in his film Apocalypse Now, which examined the senselessness of the Vietnam War.

The novel became a film, and the horrors were transposed into a new medium.

It’s only fitting, then, that in 2012 this story would take place in the Middle East and be told in a video game.

There are many allusions throughout 2K’s violent third-person cover-shooter to both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now.

Captain Martin Walker shares his first name with Martin Sheen, the actor who plays Captain Benjamin Willard in the film. The mysterious Colonel Konrad in Spec Ops: The Line takes his name from Joseph Conrad, and of course bears a resemblance to Heart of Darkness antagonist, Kurtz (described as a painter and a genius in the book) as well as Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. The ubiquitous Radioman dogging your footsteps throughout the game bears an uncanny resemblance to Dennis Hopper’s reporter from Apocalypse Now.

And yet, the game is no more a remake of either of these works than Apocalypse Now was a remake of Heart of Darkness. Coppola’s film borrowed thematically from Conrad’s book and then built its story around the skeletal frame of its plot, but it remained unique – a separate and fundamentally different piece of work. Partly this is because film can tell stories in ways that novels cannot, and vice versa.

Spec Ops: The Line is very much its own story as well, with its own twists and unique commentary on war and violence and what it means to be a hero, telling its story in ways that only a video game can.

The Good

I realized early on that this game was going to be good.

Graphics aren’t everything, but the visuals are not only stunning, they’re vibrantly colorful. Shooters these days are often brown and gray, sapped of color and detail. Spec Ops: The Line is not merely detailed, it’s bright. The buried city of Dubai, adrift in an endless sandstorm, is in turns alive with brilliant blue skies and yellow sand, and awash in the lurid crimson of the dead.

Meanwhile, the actual game mechanics are extremely fluid. I’ve played quite a few third-person cover-shooters at this point, and to be quite honest I find most of them lacking. The Line’s combination of squad-based tactics and run-and-gun vs. stealth options, combined with straightforward controls that were easy to learn and utilize, makes the gameplay itself gratifying, even as the story becomes increasingly dark…and weird.

It wasn’t until probably about halfway through the game that I realized it was going to be great. I had no idea what to expect going in, and like many people expected your typical shot of adrenaline and testosterone.

A great shooter is hard to find. Few games carve out a space the way Half-Life 2 or BioShock did, or inspire me to actually finish playing the way the first Halo inspired.

Most shooters hew more closely to something like Call of Duty or Battlefield. Mindless plots and mindless killing. These things do have their place, of course, and I enjoy the skill required to actually do well in a shooter, especially in their entirely plot-free multiplayer modes. But the fact that this game isn’t mindless isn’t just a breath of fresh air.

By the time I’d finished the game, I’d realized something else: not only was it a great game, it was an important game.

The Line is important in the way we look, not just at violence in games or the horrors of war, but in what we expect out of our video games in the first place. What sort of writing have we come to expect? What sort of acting? What happens to these expectations when a developer comes out with a game that really raises the bar?

Most importantly, Spec Ops: The Line shows us how video games can tell stories in truly unique ways. There is a great deal about the game that’s “cinematic” and while it has some very murky moral choice for you and your Captain Walker to make, it’s largely a linear experience. But by immersing players into the game, by handing over these hard choices to the player, The Line is able to tell a story in a way that no other medium could.

While I can see how the game could easily be adapted to the Silver Screen, I don’t think it would resonate in the same way it does with you pulling the trigger – both figuratively and literally.

Those moments of doubt and that sick feeling you get in your stomach when deciding how to proceed simply wouldn’t exist in a film. Nor would those uncomfortable feelings be so closely juxtaposed to the many enjoyable moments of shooting through wave after wave of enemy soldiers.

That same sense of uneasiness is present throughout the game. The mysterious Radioman and his DJ routine, guiding enemies toward you in between loud rock-and-roll music; the beauty of the buried city of Dubai; the growing sense that something just isn’t right – all of this creates a palpable sensation of distrust. As your narrator becomes increasingly unreliable, the world around you starts to feel paper-thin, almost illusory.

Your choices start to feel almost pointless – which is, of course, by design.

“The concept we currently have of player agency [in most video games] is that since I’m the player and I’m the hero and this world revolves around me, it has to react however I want it to react,” lead writer Walt Williams told Ars Technica. “If I want to be the good guy, it has to back up my choice and let me be the good guy. And that’s just not the way the world works. … We wanted the choices in the game to be realistic in that you walk into them and you don’t know all the information. You simply know what’s going on in front of you and you have an idea of what you can do… yeah it’s going to go a particular way based on what you’ve done, but ultimately there’s more information than you know.”

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Whilst I disagree on the quality of the core shooting, it’s pretty generic stuff. It works, but it never feels like it’s excelling at anything, with the only point of interest being the execution mechanic (bullets are pretty scarce, but executing wounded soldiers gives you more, tempting you towards that brutality, or the risk of trying to melee an enemy down so you can guarantee the execution chance), the story is more than enough to make up for it.

Spec Ops is one of the few games that gets videogame storytelling absolutely and unquestionably right. Every major step along Captain Walker’s road happens under the direct control of the player. Although the aftermath of them is shown in cutscenes, the actions you take to get there are things that happened wholly under the player’s direction, no quick time events or branching cutscenes, it’s all direct control. There’s no swingeing out of the horrific things that happen here with the argument “well I wouldn’t have done that” either. You did do it. You might say “I wouldn’t have done that if I’d known”, but you didn’t stop to consider that before you did it.

Well this is why I put the disclaimer in about the mechanics. They seemed really fluid to me, even if they were generic, and I enjoyed the squad stuff – but I’m just not versed enough in cover shooters to give an extended critique of the mechanics. Compared to some I’ve played recently, I enjoyed this more. But that could also be because it was mouse-and-keyboard rather than controller.

Totally agree about the story, though. Exactly how it should be done. Welcome to Dubai, gentlemen.

It’s shooting/aiming mechanics were somewhat broken, since they were controller-based and there were problems with mouse-acceleration not giving you the opportunity to place exact shots most of the time (e.g. aiming for the heads etc.).

I also thought that some of the “choices” like “that one scene” kind of lost the impact they could’ve gotten if they actually gave the PLAYER the choice to do it, instead of forcing it on them. For instance I knew exactly that something bad would happen before bombing the camp, even tried a different tactic once or twice before finally doing it, but some of the soldiers were invulnerable and there were dozens of them shooting at you at once, never missing. There was really no choice in what to do if you wanted to continue with the game and play through it and imo that somewhat mindered the impact of it all.

Two thoughts: I didn’t really mind the shooting mechanics, actually. I thought they were good in fact, but I’m not a big third-person-shooter player so I might just not have the right points of comparison.

In terms of choices, however, I think it’s key to view the game as only giving you the illusion of choice. These events have already transpired. This is memory, not reality. Hence the lack of any real choices—rather, you “remember” things slightly differently depending on how things shake out. Though this isn’t quite the case at the end where the choice you make actually does matter.

Erik, I would have to take some issue with this game. While I know it’s a stereotype to think that all soldiers are boy scout heroes, we’ve got a new stereotype. Which is that all soldiers come back from war mentally deranged. While I certainly understand and appreciate people pointing out that war is not pretty or desirable, I think most of us get that. While I appreciate people pointing out the hard times that soldiers go through, all the focus seems to be on people who come back “crazy”.

My father has been deployed multiple times, he won’t tell me anything about what happened over there, but I can tell you he’s the same dad he’s ever been. He didn’t come back “crazy”, he doesn’t jump at loud noises, he’s not always “on the edge”, or any of the other stereotypical traits that people love to put in movies, etc. Some people do go through a lot of mental trauma thanks to war, but a lot come back just fine.

So, did you play it or are you going off of my post? I think that’s important. I also think it’s important to view this under the lens of the work it was inspired by – madness is a big theme in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. I don’t think the game is trying to say that anyone who goes to war will go crazy. Obviously not everyone in the game goes crazy, after all. But some people certainly suffer from various forms of PTSD, and anyone with family in the military knows that the history of how we treat veterans in this country is lousy at best. So I don’t think this is anti-soldier nearly so much as it is a game that tries to add depth to our understanding of war.

It wasn’t my intention to say the game was anti-soldier. Simply commenting on a general trend I’ve been noticing in media, both fictional and non-fictional, and how this game contributed to it. I do think it is good to see a game that has a more grown-up narrative. Just call me an optimist, I don’t quite understand why a more grown-up narrative seems to always mean a more bleak narrative :-)

I’ve read Heart of Darkness and liked the book and can see where this game draws that inspiration.

I don’t think the game was implying that every soldier comes back from war crazy. But certainly some do, and some soldiers have done terrible things that will warp them for life. There are a million games where soldier go in, shoot the bad guys, raise the American flag, and come home.

How many games are there where the soldiers do terrible things they know are terrible because they need to be done to survive? How many games actually touch the subject that not everyone who dies in battle is some evil terrorist who deserves it? Or that not everyone comes back from war mentally sound?

Spec Ops is refreshing because it bucks the trend and takes a different path than pretty much every other military shooter out right now.

This review has convinced me to give the game another try. The demo was sub-par, to say the least, and it left me feeling that this was just another brown&bloom military third person shooter with no depth whatsoever.

And if we’re on the subject of games that don’t glorify war, you should really give Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad a try. I bought the game during this year’s Steam Summer Sale and from a game mechanic point of view it’s closer to Arma2 and Operation Flashpoint, but it’s still a first person shooter rather than a mil-sim. The campaign is very bad due to enemy and friendly bot AI, but the online multiplayer is where the real meat is. And what I mean by that is the fact that Tripwire managed to give your in-game avatar a bit of character. I still remember the first time playing the Territory game mode on Grain Elevator. The first couple of points are somewhat easy to capture, but once the fight moves into the building, every stairwell, every bit of cover, every floor is fought over tooth and nail. As I recall we were fighting over the stairwell to the second floor and we finally managed to almost get to the second floor, but my squad was wiped out, I was wounded and yet I decided to push forward. At the top of the stairs I found a soviet soldier who just started bolting his Mosin rifle, I fired my rifle only to be greeted by the ominous click of an empty chamber. I charged him with my bayonet and ran him through. As he started stumbling back I heard him calling for his mother as he was dying. That first time I’ve ever heard that death sound from a soviet soldier and that really shook me. I stood there, in the stairwell, shocked. I felt remorse for someone I killed online in an FPS. That was, still is, something that has never happened to me since I’ve started playing video games in 1991.

And speaking of sleeper hits of the year, you should give Binary Domain a try. It’s a third person shooter with an interesting story, a new take on the shooting mechanic and some incredible boss fights. The first hour of the game is a prolonged tutorial level that moves slow and gets quite annoying at times, but after that, the game really picks up and it only gets better. Especially after Cain joins your party.

“This review has convinced me to give the game another try. The demo was sub-par, to say the least, and it left me feeling that this was just another brown&bloom military third person shooter with no depth whatsoever.”

I never tried the demo, but I’m pretty sure that feeling at the beginning of the game is intentional. I also think that’s why they cast Nolan North, resident golden boy all-American hero (when it comes to voice acting), in the lead role. It gives you expectations of what the game will be at the beginning, only to rip the rug out from under you later.

Probably one of the better titles I’ve played this year tbh. Shortly after having finished it I played through Max Payne 3 and the gulf between the storytelling couldn’t be more pronounced in terms of the confidence of spec ops Vs MP3. Albeit I don’t think Max Payne 3 is a bad game by any measure, nothing happens in it that is surprising because the writing telegraphs what’s coming up constantly, where as with Spec Ops you’re really never sure what’s around the corner in terms of the narrative. Albeit SO:TL hasn’t set the world alight in terms of sales I do hope that more people do pick it up and other developers look upon it as a lead off point, because it’s definitely setting a high bar in terms of storytelling.